“It’s possible. But I agree that we made a mistake when we hired him.”
Half an hour later he was on his way north across the locks at Slussen in the car he
had borrowed from Frode’s wife. It was a ten-year-old Volvo she never used.
Blomkvist had been given leave to borrow it whenever he liked.
It was the tiny details that he could easily have missed if he had not been alert:
some papers not as evenly stacked as he remembered; a binder not quite flush on
the shelf; his desk drawer closed all the way—he was positive that it was an inch
open when he left.
Someone had been inside his cottage.
He had locked the door, but it was an ordinary old lock that almost anyone could
pick with a screwdriver, and who knew how many keys were in circulation. He
systematically searched his office, looking for what might be missing. After a while
he decided that everything was still there.
Nevertheless someone had been in the cottage and gone through his papers and
binders. He had taken his computer with him, so they had not been able to access
that. Two questions arose: who was it? and how much had his visitor been able to
find out?
The binders belonged to the part of Vanger’s collection that he brought back to the
guest house after returning from prison. There was nothing of the new material in
them. His notebooks in the desk would read like code to the uninitiated—but was
the person who had searched his desk uninitiated?
In a plastic folder on the middle of the desk he had put a copy of the date book list
and a copy of the verses. That was serious. It would tell whoever it was that the
date book code was cracked.
So who was it?
Vanger was in the hospital. He did not suspect Anna. Frode? He had already told
him all the details. Cecilia Vanger had cancelled her trip to Florida and was back
from London—along with her sister. Blomkvist had only seen her once, driving her
car across the bridge the day before. Martin Vanger. Harald Vanger. Birger